Well, the corrupt alchemists of capital are at it again, and Matt Taibbi has a scathing new article that reveals that Libor has an evil “twin brother.”

According to his feature in Rolling Stoneyesterday, financial regulators suspect that some of the world’s largest banks -- the same banks that were caught manipulating the interest rates in the Libor scandal -- have been manipulating the prices of interest-rate swaps.

What are interest-rate swaps, you ask? They may sound a lot like the notorious credit-default swaps that helped Wall Street bet against its products in the lead-up to the 2008 financial meltdown, but interest-rate swaps are in fact infinitely more powerful--and more profitable.

As Taibbi explains, “interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.”

As you may guess, interest-rate swaps and the global interest rates are related. And since we already know that the major banks colluded to manipulate the global interest rates (that’s what the Libor scandal was all about), now what we’re looking is, in the words of Taibbi, an “undisguised, real-world conspiracy”

In layman’s terms, Taibbi explains, “if you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.”

Oh, and regulators are also looking into whether these same bankers manipulated the prices of gold and silver. You know, just to make sure they had all their bases covered.

The Russian edition of
Cosmopolitan, which began publication in 1995, provides a case in point… with
the significant capitalist inroads made in the 1990s, it seemed possible that
there existed a sufficient audience, particularly in Moscow and St.
Petersburg, to sustain a radically different, radically capitalist, magazine.
The publisher Derk Sauer, who successfully launched the Russian Good
Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, and Playboy, felt that Russia, with its size,
had the potential to become a significant magazine market. More and more
products aimed at women were being produced there, but there were few vehicles
to enhance sales; magazines, of course, selectively and productively provide
that service. Sauer’s business partner, Annemarie van Gaal, described how she
chased the Hearst Magazines International president George Green all over the
world to make her case for a Cosmo launch. ‘I knew Cosmo could work here,’ she
explained. ‘You looked at Russian women and you saw how they dressed, how they
looked to the West, how they wanted to improve themselves. I knew that if there
was one magazine that shows how your life can be, a shop window you can look
in, this educational element that says you can do it this way or that way, and
that empowers you to do it, it was Cosmo,’

Mike Stivers for Truthout: Anyone following issues of
civil liberties under Obama knows that his administration's policies have been
disastrous. The signing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),
which effectively legalizes indefinite detention of US citizens, the
prosecution of more whistleblowers than any previous president, the refusal to
close Guantanamo, and the adoption of ruthless positions in trials such as
Hedges vs. Obama and Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project don't even encapsulate
the full extent of the flagrant violations of civil, political and
constitutional rights. One basic question that a lot of people seem to be
asking is, why? What's the rationale?

Believe in yourself, she
exorts. Like yourself, but then feel utterly guiltless for working to look your
best. Fashion is silly, but enjoy taking it seriously… Sex is good, even when
it is not great. Money matters; so does being smart and acting smart. Good
health is critical; exercise facilitates it… Someday Mr. Right will come along.
‘He will be a good man, delicious in bed, but also kind, gentle, smart, mad
about you.’ […] ‘Grab him,’ she instructs about the right man when he comes along.
‘You’ll need to read Mommy’s books to find out how to do that.’

editors, described by one
journalist as ‘lifestyle evangelists,’ follow their mentor closely, for like
‘all good evangelists,’ their work will not be completed ‘untill the Cosmo Girl
confidently struts the boardrooms and the bedrooms of the whole civilized
world.’

as Brown ages, technologies for
addressing the aging body to ‘do femininity,’ provides a means for women whose
bodies no longer conform to the mandates of desirability to continue to look –
and feel – younger. Many feminists might acknowledge but lament this reality,
finding in it evidence of just how little things have changed for women. Others
will warn of the potentially harmful side effects of cosmetic surgeries gone
wrong. The intrepid Brown, however, finds cosmetic surgery a perfectly
acceptable means of making it as an old woman in a world that women have
neither designed nor feel welcome in.

Helen Gurley Brown’s only
concern about cosmetic surgery is its expense and the ability of ‘her girls’ to
access it. ‘You might need to save money or take a second job she argues, ‘but
I absolutely recommend it.’ She recognizes that good looks remain important
through the lifespan and that, thanks in part to her, women find themselves
playing the beauty game for years longer. They now stay in the workplace and
the dating marketplace not only through middle age but through what many
consider old age.

Without apology, Brown has had multiple surgeries,
including dermabrasion, facelifts, silicone injections, and breast
augmentation. The way she sees it, ‘You have to put yourself against age if you
intend to be a vital, sexual woman all your life as I do.’

Even as she did what she could to forestall aging,
Brown occasionally encountered reminders that she was growing older.

‘There is just no way that I
can believe I’m the real age that I am,’ she mused. ‘I think older age is just
the pits, but you have to be some kind of nutcase to assume that you’re
escaping it. So I escape it as best I can, through my work.’ In this regard
Brown would be joined by countless women of her generation and later who could
find identity through work and fight the invisibility of the aging woman, and
the aging induced by inactivity, by remaining in the workplace as long as
possible.

she was reluctant to move into
the role of cheerleader for older women. In 1982, after all, at age sixty, she
had published Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money, Even If You’re Starting
with Nothing, and although this book acknowledged that she drew on her many
years of experience to offer advice about living well, Brown did not include
aging among the book’s many thematic chapters.

Little by little… she began to
read the reactions to her aging self on the faces and through the body
language of others; that, coupled with hard looks in the mirror, landed her in
therapy. Her therapist told her, simply, ‘Older is what we get.’ The psychiatrist,
herself seventy-three, benefited at that moment from her own advanced age. ‘If
she’d been forty,’ Brown quipped, ‘I think I would have hit her.’ As someone
who had always prided herself on her ability to live in the real world, Brown
found herself uncharacteristically unprepared to deal with this simple and
inevitable reality. This fact, in and of itself, provided her impetus to write.

When most other feminists
considered Helen Gurley Brown at all, they found her brand of liberation
vexing. For one thing, she was an enormous proponent of the free market…

It makes sense that, given her
political beliefd and individualist allegiance to the system, another of the
key differences between Helen Gurley Brown and other feminists would be their
takes on individual versus collective change. Gloria Steinem would admonish
Brown that Cosmopolitan existed only on a personal level and failed to advocate
for structural changes that would benefit all women. Brown recognized that she
operated primarily on the individual level but refused to apologize for it.

Whereas a generation ago, dissent and biting satire were allowed in the 'mainstream,' today their counterfeits are acceptable and a fake moral zeitgeist rules. 'Identity' is all, mutating feminism and declaring class obsolete. Just as collateral damage covers for mass murder, 'austerity' has become an acceptable lie. Beneath the veneer of consumerism, a quarter of Greater Manchester is reported to be living in 'extreme poverty.'De reden dat ik Mak en Sauer als voorbeelden gebruik is omdat ik beiden al langere tijd persoonlijk ken en ik hun werk illustrerend vind voor de steeds meer om zich heen grijpende gevaarlijke intellectuele corruptie en kitsch. Dezelfde corruptie waarop Pilger telkens weer wijst, zoals in dit fragment:What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; her 'Triumph of the Will' cast Hitler's spell.

She told me that the 'messages' of her films were dependent not on 'orders from above,' but on the 'submissive void' of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? 'Everyone,' she said.

Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. 'Choice' is ubiquitous. Phones are 'platforms' that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it. Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne heads-down, relentlessly monitored and prioritised. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My needs. Riefenstahl's submissive void is today's digital slavery.

Edward Said described this wired state in 'Culture and Imperialism' as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.Today's 'message' of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behaviour, this is extremism. When Hugo Chavez challenged it, he was abused in bad faith; and his successor will be subverted by the same zealots of the American Enterprise Institute, Harvard's Kennedy School and the 'human rights' organisations that have appropriated American liberalism and underpin its propaganda. The historian Norman Pollack calls this 'liberal fascism.' He wrote, 'All is normality on display. For [Nazi] goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work [in the White House], planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.'

Whereas a generation ago, dissent and biting satire were allowed in the 'mainstream,' today their counterfeits are acceptable and a fake moral zeitgeist rules. "Identity" is all, mutating feminism and declaring class obsolete. Just as collateral damage covers for mass murder, 'austerity' has become an acceptable lie. Beneath the veneer of consumerism, a quarter of Greater Manchester is reported to be living in 'extreme poverty.'http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-new-propaganda-is-liberal-the-new-slavery-is-digital

(Photo: Pete Souza / White House)Mike Stivers for Truthout: Anyone following issues of civil liberties under Obama knows that his administration's policies have been disastrous. The signing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which effectively legalizes indefinite detention of US citizens, the prosecution of more whistleblowers than any previous president, the refusal to close Guantanamo, and the adoption of ruthless positions in trials such as Hedges vs. Obama and Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project don't even encapsulate the full extent of the flagrant violations of civil, political and constitutional rights. One basic question that a lot of people seem to be asking is, why? What's the rationale?

Noam Chomsky: That's a very interesting question. I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don't seem easy to explain. In many ways the worst is what you mention, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project. That's an Obama initiative and it's a very serious attack on civil liberties. He doesn't gain anything from it – he doesn't get any political mileage out of it. In fact, most people don't even know about it, but what it does is extend the concept of "material assistance to terror" to speech.

The case in question was a law group that was giving legal advice to groups on the terrorist list, which in itself has no moral or legal justification; it's an abomination. But if you look at the way it's been used, it becomes even more abhorrent (Nelson Mandela was on it until a couple of years ago.) And the wording of the colloquy is broad enough that it could very well mean that if, say, you meet with someone in a terrorist group and advise them to turn to nonviolent means, then that's material assistance to terrorism. I've met with people who are on the list and will continue to do so, and Obama wants to criminalize that, which is a plain attack on freedom of speech. I just don't understand why he's doing it.

The NDAA suit, of which I'm a plaintiff - it mostly codifies existing practice. While there has been some protest over the indefinite detention clause, there's one aspect of it that I'm not entirely happy with. The only protest that's being raised is in response to detention of American citizens, but I don't see why we should have the right to detain anyone without trial. The provision of the NDAA that allows for this should not be tolerated. It was banned almost eight centuries ago in the Magna Carta.

It's the same with the drone killings. There was some protest over the Anwar Al-Awlaki killing because he was an American citizen. But what about someone who isn't an American citizen? Do we have a right to murder them if the president feels like it?

I don't know what base he's appealing to. If he thinks he's appealing to the nationalist base, well, they're not going to vote for him anyway. That's why I don't understand it. I don't think he's doing anything besides alienating his own natural base. So it's something else.

What it is is the same kind of commitment to expanding executive power that Cheney and Rumsfeld had. He kind of puts it in mellifluous terms and there's a little difference in his tone. It's not as crude and brutal as they were, but it's pretty hard to see much of a difference.

It also extends to other developments, most of which we don't really know about, likethe surveillance state that's being built and the capacity to pick up electronic communication. It's an enormous attack on personal space and privacy. There's essentially nothing left. And that will get worse with the new drone technologies that are being developed and given to local police forces.

That expansion of the surveillance state, do you see that as another facet of expanding executive power?

It's an enormous expansion of executive power. I doubt that they can do much with this information that's being stored. I've had plenty of experience with the FBI in simpler years when they didn't have all this stuff. But they had tons of information. They were just drowning in it and didn't know how to use it. It's sort of like walking into the New York Public Library and saying "I want to be a chemist." You've got all the information there, but it's not doing any good.